THE MICROSCOPE. 



their exteriors with a low power. Many of those require neither 

 preparation nor mounting-^ l)eing too common or abundant to repay 

 the sHghtest labor bestowed upon them. Others, however — and 

 their same is legion— can and should be preserved in some permanent 

 manner, readily accessible, and easily arranged for examination. Jn 

 the vegetable kingdom we are presented with an endless and charm- 

 ing variety of beautiful forms in the seeds of even our commonest 

 flowers, or even weeds, whilst the feathers, scales and hairs of the 

 animal afford a never ending storehouse of treasures for the seeker 

 after the curious and beautiful. The pollen from the tinniest 

 flower, or the sands from the shores of the mighty ocean, alike pre- 

 sent us forms and colors of surpassing beauty; and the preservation 

 of these in a permanent form is at times most desirable. It shall 

 be the purport of the present paper to point out some plain methods 

 of doing so, which will produce good results if carefully followed. 



Let us term this method of mounting "The Dry Wa}'^," to distin- 

 guish it from those preparations made in aqueous or other fluids, and 

 proceed to make our mount in one of the several ways whereby it 

 may be done. The books have been filled with such for years, good, 

 bad, and indifferent. We have had full discussions of the merits 

 and demerits of cells, possible and impossible; some made of shel- 

 lac, turned upon a whirling table with the point of a pen-knife, at 

 an immense expenditure of time and patience; others of wax, bone, 

 tin, hard and soft rubber, curtain rings, and a host of other sub- 

 stances; anything, in fact, but those, or rather that possessing the 

 one quality needful for a dry cell, namely, the quality of remaining 

 dry. For be it distinctly understood, that though a 

 cell may be made and hermetically sealed, in which 

 no appearance of moisture will ever occur, such an 

 event is an anomaly and can never be duplicated 

 with any certainty. No matter how dry the specimen may appear 

 to be, n®r the atmosphere of the room or the surface of the covering 

 glass, sooner or later the under side of latter will become covered by 

 a mist like substance, which obscures and spoils phe view of the im- 

 prisoned specimen. This of course is the case only with such pre- 

 parations, as are mounted on the bottom of a cell of any depth, 

 the cover being used merely as a protection from dust and other in- 

 jury. Where diatoms, the scales of insects, or other minute objects 

 are mounted directly upon the under surface of the cover itself, this 



